Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Two Recent Studies, Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Long Run Effects of Student Debt Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings.  Here are two abstracts of interest.  I haven’t gone through the papers themselves, so I can’t vouch for their methodologies, but the results they...

Why I’m Not Going to Properly Review “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart” I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now.  I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (PRW) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.  I...

Gas prices fail to ignite overall inflation in April, but real wages flat so far for 2019 The consumer price index rose +0.3% in April, just as in March mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. This is actually a surprisingly small increase because, as I pointed out last month, almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did — up 9% in March and 11% for April — consumer prices as a whole have gone up at least +0.4%....

The Psilocybin Referendum In Denver This is one of the last things I was expecting to see happen; that a referendum in Denver would effectively decriminalize magic mushrooms or more specifically the main constituent component of them, the psychedelic drug, psilocybin.  But this has happened in the Mile High City, if by a narrow margin.  I largely welcome this.  After all, it has always been sort of ridiculous to arrest someone for owning a naturally...

Econospeak (Barkley Rosser, pgl, Peter Dorman, Tom Walker) is in the financial section along with  Bonddad blog (New Deal democrat) and  Capital Ebbs and Flows (Joseph Joyce), and I am proud to say have a direct connection to Angry Bear (under general blogs…). Dear Dan, I wanted to let you know that your blog, Angry Bear Blog has been featured in the Top 100 Economics Blogs of 2019 One of the significant changes this year has been the removal of...

The National Bureau of Economic Research has highlighted two studies. (hat tip Spencer England) U.S. Consumers Have Borne the Brunt of the Current Trade War Recent tariff increases are unprecedented in the post-World War II era in terms of breadth, magnitude, and the sizes of the countries involved. In 2018, the United States imposed tariffs on a variety of imported goods, and other countries responded with tariffs on imports from America. Two new...

Scenes from the April jobs report The headline news in Friday’s employment report was excellent. But underneath those headlines, all is not well. Let’s celebrate the excellent headlines first. Adding 263,000 jobs in April was one of the dozen best reports of this entire expansion: Next, here is the YoY% change in nonfarm payrolls, showing an uptick after the deceleration in the prior two months: The total number of unemployed was at the lowest...

I think it might be time for an update on the crudest of tiny sample reduced form analysis of fiscal policy and the current recovery. One reason for my continued interest is that there was a rather large tax cut enacted in 2017. Trump critics tend to argue that it failed to encourage investment, but did affect aggregate demand. I wonder if the noticeable increase in GDP growth is due to the tax cut or the spending increase from the 2017 omnibus spending...

Median wage and salary growth stalls in Q1, while overall positive trend remains intact UPDATE: real household income declined The Employment Cost Index is a median measure of wages, and also total compensation, for the 50th percentile worker. Thus it escapes the “Bill Gates walks into a bar” issue with average measures. Sunday I wrote that “It has been improving for several years now, and I am expecting it to continue.” Not quite. While both the wage...

New home sales suggest housing bottom is in New home sales are extremely volatile, and extremely revised, but they do have the advantage of probably being the single most leading housing statistic, ahead of permits and starts. So it is noteworthy that new home sales for March rose to 692,000, below only one month in late 2017 when they hit their expansion high of 712,000: I have been looking for the bottom in housing, as mortgage interest rates have...